• Cinergy Budgeting

Speaking of budgeting programs, a popular choice among Media Services customers for several years has been Cinergy Budgeting from Mindstar Productions. Part of the Cinergy Motion Picture Production System (a.k.a. Cinergy 2000) that also includes Cinergy Scheduling, Cinergy On-Set Shot Logging and Cinergy Post-Production, Cinergy Budgeting has some unique features of its own. Several studio chart of accounts templates are available in the base package. If your company is not included in the base set of templates, you can define your own chart of accounts and use the template in any future budgets you wish. Along with the commonly used features for fringes, variables and equations, you can also set up equations that pull information directly from the schedule, which Mindstar cites as one of the benefits of using an integrated package.

For example, the number of shooting days can be set up manually, or pulled directly from the stripboard. Cinergy can even automatically modify the budget if you ever go back and change the number of shooting days in the stripboard.  Cinergy also includes a Labor Rate Browser program, which can be used both as an integrated component of Cinergy Budgeting, and as a standalone program that you can pull up even when you aren't running Cinergy. Quarterly data updates are sold for a nominal fee. If you don't own Cinergy Budgeting, you can still purchase the standalone labor rate browser with one quarter of labor rate data included.

Stasi Poulos, president and CEO of Mindstar Productions, says that the strength of the budgeting module comes from what he calls the "Cinergy Concept": the flow of data from the earliest stages of preproduction all the way to the editing room. "We design our products as a conduit that streamlines that flow, connecting to as many devices as we can along the way," he says.

A 15-day fully functional trial copy (including save & print) is available from the Mindstar web site at www.MindstarProds.com. Support is provided through email and also through MSN and Yahoo instant messenger chat sessions. Studio production plans are available, including premium support options and on-site training. For more information, please contact Steve Bizenov at Media Services, 917-305-8309.